Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Harper Collins; 25th Anniversary edition
When I met Brandon, I was unprepared to love him.
At four, he was aggressive, angry, and homeless, with cocoa brown eyes and skinny arms and legs and a chronic runny nose. He fought whoever tried to wipe it. He lived with his mother at a shelter, a dilapidated house with a spacious front hall and serviceable but shabby rooms jutting from all sides. In the evenings, I volunteered there as a free babysitter.
The volunteers met in the hall, and the kids, ranging from pre-teen to pre-toddler, tumbled at us in a rush of high voices and collisions. When everyone had arrived, we trooped down to the playroom, a dank basement room filled with a crush of games, books and toys in various states of disrepair.
Then came chaos.
Loud games and quiet games and boy games and girl games operated over and around each other, as the kids bickered and flung toys and broke crayons, and we refereed and tried to make them share.
Brandon was in this maelstrom somewhere, avoiding participation. He didn't like Twister, wouldn't color, and couldn't sit still to play Memory; he saw no use for dress-up clothes and had no interest in puppets. Instead he picked up an L-shaped piece of foam and pretended it was a gun to shoot other kids with. He hovered near the other kids, waiting for someone to bump into him, and then he punched them. The other kids cried when he attacked them, and he was impervious to our scolding.
I thought, Kids aren't supposed to be like that. I'd heard about traumatized children, about people spending years trying to make the slightest progress. I don't have that kind of time, I thought.
He seemed especially hopeless when compared to the other kids, like Isaac: a toddler with white-blond curls and a beatific smile, who thrilled to airplanes in the sky and fire trucks on the street, and squealed, "Mommy!" when his mother came to fetch him. Or there was Rosie, a preschooler with long black braids, who ran to hug me when I arrived, and took my hands before I could even put my bag down. She was sunny and giggly, and easy to adore.
Brandon growled and yelled and mumbled garbled versions of swear words. He ran around aimlessly, a weapon seeking a target.
"Do you want to read a story?" I asked him, trying to ignore my reservations out of a sense of fairness. But he shrugged me off and ran away. Sometimes, when it was quiet, I said, "Well, I'm going to read by myself." I sat nearby and read aloud, making a big show of it, hoping he might become interested. He didn't.
"Do you want to read a story?" Week after week, on my knees, I tried to make eye contact, as he squirmed and refused to even look at me.
Then one day, without asking, I plopped him in my lap and started reading Where the Wild Things Are. And for several pages, he didn't protest. Not believing my luck, I made my voice loud and theatrical, and pointed out things on the pages. "See the dog? Look at that tree!" We didn't get halfway through before he ran off to wrestle something away from another kid, but it felt like a success.
The next week, I began another dramatic reading. The other kids were busy playing a game with another volunteer, and Brandon was milling around the periphery of the room, by himself.
"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind...and another...his mother called him 'WILD THING!' and Max said 'I'LL EAT YOU UP!' so he was sent to bed without eating anything."
Brandon appeared at my side. He pushed my hand off of the page and pointed at Max in his monster suit, with a fork in his hand.
"Fork," he said. "Fork."
"That's right!" I exclaimed, "Max has a fork, very good!" I exchanged glances with the other volunteer. She shrugged.
I kept reading, Brandon beside me, and every few pages we went back to look at Max with the fork. "Yes," I told him, whenever he said the word. "That's a fork, very good!"
The next week, when I asked Brandon to read a story, he stopped what he was doing and ran to the bookshelf. Astonished, I watched him select two books. The first was the hardbound Where the Wild Things Are. The second — it took him a while to find it — was a paperback copy of Where the Wild Things Are. He handed me the first, and seated himself on the second, and I choked back a laugh and began reading.
We read the whole book, stopping to comment on the dog, the trees, and of course, the fork, and then I asked, "Should we read something else?" He took the first book, put the second into my hands, and looked at me expectantly. Almost giddy, I read.
***
At the shelter, most of the kids needed one-on-one attention in a desperate, heartbreaking way, and didn't even care if the attention was positive.
Once, I scolded a little boy, and another clamored, "me next!"
"You next? What for?"
"Yell at me next," he said eagerly.
"You haven't done anything wrong!"
But to humor him, I put on an angry face and shook my finger, scolding, "You stop sitting there on the floor, you hear?" And he squealed and giggled and squirmed.
Brandon remained incomprehensible, fierce. He still threw blocks. He threw punching-kicking-screaming tantrums, that ended when I carried him to an empty room, where he kicked and screamed until he exhausted himself, and I sat and waited while he wound himself down.
But he let me read to him. Sometimes he even seemed glad to see me arrive. That was enough.
Elizabeth O'Brien lives in Somerville, MA. Her writing has appeared in Glide Magazine and the Charles River Review.